We’ve spent most of the last month in ‘Tornado Alley’ – Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota – and we’ve heard lots of conversations about weather alert radios. We’re normally at our computers and on the Internet, so we use a website, my-cast.com to monitor weather. We really like that website, and we didn’t want to buy a radio. We also heard some of the drawbacks of the radio. Most require you to know the county you’re in … right – I’m lucky to know what state I’m in! And, you could get annoying, unrelated alerts in the middle of the night.
When we got to Minneapolis for the FMCA rally, we heard that Tornado warnings had happened just the night before and we got worried. Jim noticed that My-Cast had recently been purchased by Garmin and was offering a $4/mo service to send the weather alerts to your cell phone! Cool. Our cell phones are with us all the time. Now they vibrate and or ring anytime there is a weather alert in one of our specified areas.
Luckily, we didn’t get any tornado warnings while we were in Minneapolis. But, Jim also set it up to show reports about storms in Florida, where our family lives. Thus, the photo at the beginning of this post.
I sure hope we never experience a tornado in our RV. How do you protect yourself?
Chris Guld
www.GeeksOnTour.com
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Chris Guld
Hello Bill,
Once you have the service set up on your cell phone, you can manage your locations right on your phone. Using your phone’s menu – open the My-Cast weather application and you should see a ‘Manage Locations’ option. Then you can delete old locations or add new. The new ones are added using zip codes or just City/State. Pretty easy.
Bill Chaffee
After you get this service how does it work? Do you need to put in your zip code, or does it keep up with you as you go down the road? If you are traveling 300 mi. in a day you will be constantly changing zip codes and it would be nice to be alerted of any bad weather that you may hit down the road. Thanks and keep up the good work.
Pam Rank
Hi
I also have weather related info sent to my cell phone through weatherbug.com.
They text the information. It includes a message every couple of days regarding the forecast for the next couple of days. I have also received many thunderstorm and tornado watches and warnings (we are in tornado alley). We also have a weather radio in the trailer and weatherbug has been very accurate. It costs $2.99 per month.
Nick Russell
Great info, Chris! I have put a link to your post in my blog for tomorrow.
We have sat out a couple of tornadoes in our bus conversion, and it is not fun!